Zitationsvorschlag
Lizenz (Kapitel)
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International.
Identifier (Buch)
Veröffentlicht
Black Literature and Science in the Age of COVID-19
ABSTRACT Racism in Britain is a public health issue. The health of Black and minority ethnic Britons is shaped by structural discrimination and inequality, leading to illness and, in many cases, death. The Windrush scandal saw the withdrawal of NHS services from those wrongly labelled as non-citizens as well as high levels of stress and anxiety caused by the loss of jobs, homes, benefits, and wrongful deportation. The COVID-19 pandemic has also had a disproportionate impact on Black Britons, who have been found to be four times more likely to die of COVID-19 than white people. How do we do literature and science studies, or medical humanities scholarship, in this context? How do we read, imagine, intervene in, and understand the way that hostile environments and spaces—the street, the hospital, the university—shape the experience of Black Britons in ways which science and medicine are unable or unwilling to capture? Who is the ‘we’ I am referring to here, and who is ‘our’ audience for this work? In this essay, I explore some possible responses to these questions, in dialogue with Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) and with the work of other Black thinkers and writers which asks us to carefully attend to our methodological responses to racism across disciplines.
KEYWORDS Bristol, interdisciplinarity, literature, race, science
